Page 1 of Dream On, Liar

Prologue

Rihaan

I HAD SPENT MOST of my life trying to outrun a name that was already waiting for me at the finish line.

It was stitched into scorecards before I’d earned them, spoken with pride in commentary boxes long before I’d proved anything; carried in the way people watched me walk onto a field as if they were seeing a replay instead of a beginning.

My father had built something too large to step out of. I didn’t inherit his legacy so much as get drafted into it.

But looking back, I wasn’t sure I’d change much of it.

There had been times when I’d often looked at my oldest brother, Dev and considered him to be the luckier one in comparison.

Like me, he’d inherited something too. Ultimately though, it had been something he’d wanted, and not something he’d been just born for.

The truth is, if our father gave me his athletic empire…our mother’s side came with it’s own empire. Only, it had been the kind that had been carved out of pressure and brilliance. Diamonds, but not the kind that simply glittered in glass cases. The kind that passed through a hundred unseen hands before they ever touched light. Mines, markets, private rooms where fortunes shifted without a sound. It didn’t need noise to command power. It simply existed; vast and unshakable, built into a dynasty by the men of the Singhania family that came long before either of us. It had been his destiny—being the eldest son—and even then; it had been something he’d long for, something he’d worked for before the keys to the kingdom were given to him. So when our grandfather had started flying him out to Delhi to teach him the inner workings of the business, he’d been ready to step into his role like it had been his choice all along, and not an inevitability waiting to happen. As a kid, he’d been all about numbers, instinct, and control—and it hadn’t been until later that I’d realised that it had been an inevitability. If he hadn’t inherited his role, he would’ve built something similar of his. Because, I’d seen the way he understood that world. It had been the way I understood line and length. The only difference was, I’d spent years learning the skill, and making sure I was the best at it—instead of just being born with it.

Though, until now, there hadn’t been a time when I used to want what he had. Not the business itself, but maybe to find the love for something that he had.

Now more than ever, I wondered if he still enjoyed what was in front of him, or if he too had that curiosity of finding something that he knew belonged to him.

Maybe that was wishful thinking. If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d felt like the outlier among my siblings.

It wasn’t just that Dev was being shaped in boarding schools and under our grandfather’s exacting eye, or that Vedant—Dev’s twin—was discovering his love for racing under our mother’s softer attention as they travelled across the UK and Europe with our younger sister, Raina—who still clung onto their love for it even after the years she’d been gone—but it was that amidst all of that, I’d never had the chance to discover any parts of it.

Because, I had already been claimed elsewhere.

By our father.

Not gently. Not partially.

Completely.

Cricket wasn’t just something he gave me. It was the way he gave me himself.

Early mornings that smelled like damp grass and leather. Evenings that ended in corrections instead of praise. A presence that never wavered, even when everything else in the house felt…uneven.

As a kid, it hadn’t felt like pressure; it had felt like being chosen.

Like being seen.

In a house where everyone seemed to belong to someone else, I belonged to him.

And cricket became the language of that belonging.

By the time I’d been old enough to make the choices that were meant to be made—the one that decided the course of my life—there weren’t really any left.

Not because I didn’t want a chance to make one, because, yet again, someone else had made them for me.

I was thirteen when my mother left.

Not the kind of leaving that comes with explanations that make sense to a boy who still measured the world in certainties. Just quiet packing, quieter conversations, and then absence. She took my younger sister with her, back to a life that had always seemed to pull at her more than the one she’d built with us—with reasons my father didn’t seem necessary to explain to a child, and left me with a gap that had only grown into something more hollow when she’d passed away four years later.

So, while my brothers had stepped into their own legacies, my sister, who would grow to be a stranger to me—with only me to blame—I stayed where I was.

With the parent who didn’t leave.

With the one who chose me by default, or design, I never quite figured out which; nor did I have the heart to question him.